Quad core 6600 @ stock
EVGA 8800 GT @ stock
Windows 7 Ultimate
While playing Dragon Age a few days ago and watching a DVD on 2nd monitor (TV thru S-Vid) Windows 7 seized up, artifacts on TV, black screen on primary monitor, and sound went into a death loop. I had to manually restart it. This was reproduced this 2 times before just giving up and going to bed. I have never had issues like this previously, but the computer is about 2 years old now.
Next day, after getting out of a certain area in Dragon Age it stopped locking to black screen, so I thought it was a fluke. Played for 5+ hours no problems. Nothing on TV monitor this time.
Next day, starts locking up again. GPU fan is whizzing away at 100% constantly for some reason. Checked the card and it was pretty warm, so I downloaded some monitoring software. Temperature was checked every 500ms and the graph was showing 0/64/128/192 celsius consistently. Was worried that my temperature sensor went out because it seemed ridiculous that they GPU would be THAT hot....64 C is about right for a GeForce 8800 GT so I figured that was the correct temperature. Regardless, I undid the heatsink, scraped off the old gunk, put on some arctic silver, and put it back in. It was running cooler to the touch, but the temp sensor was still going wacky and the fan was at 100% still.
While worried about the temp, WINDOWS started black screening me. This boggled my mind, because it was only happening in Dragon Age. I feared for the worst, because obviously I've never had any issues with this at all.
So, I reformatted thinking it may be a software issue, just in case. I was getting lock ups DURING setup. That was great fun. I'm annoyed because I didn't need to wipe it, but it didn't lock up until after I already wiped the existing OS. Annoying.
Booting into safe mode, I have no issues. It runs stable and does not lock up.
Disabling Windows Aero seemed to help for a bit, but even that has turned out to be insufficient.
I have figured it's down to power supply or my 8800 GT, and I'm really pretty sure it's the graphics card. Obviously safe mode is less intensive than normal boot, but would it really affect it that much to the point of having lock ups? Could it be that it's possibly a software conflict that I'm missing?
I'm wracking my brain here, any help or past experience would be appreciated.
EDIT:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792I baked my card...and so far no problems. Technically I get it but never in a million years would I have thought to do it. I am soooooo thankful for this.
